Parodies and permission slips all part of their worldview

Kiley Peters

Kiley Peters

Nina Metz, Tribune reporter

"One, Two, Many"

Even preteen girls in the early ’90s snickered at the lyrical idiocy of Color Me Badd’s radio staple “I Wanna Sex You Up.” I haven’t thought about that eye-rolling R&B ballad in years, but it came to mind watching this sketch show at iO from Adam Archer and Alan Linic.

Their version, called hilariously “Can I Get Your Consent?,” is the long-lost parody “I Wanna Sex You Up” always demanded. Archer and Linic’s song was in fact inspired by Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” — so, even better. The pair coo their careful seduction — “I’ll take you by the hand and lead you inside (if you want to)” — to a woman sitting in the audience before handing her a legal document from the “Ready Party” (that would be the two men on stage) requesting a signature from said female “hereinafter referred to as Totally and Definitely Consenting Party.”

I don’t know that Archer and Linic (disclosure: the latter is employed by the Tribune on the digital advertising staff) have the strongest chemistry as a two-man team on stage. They don’t quite generate the kind of odd sparks you like to see in performing duos (Nate Sherman directs) but they go for broke with physical comedy and their strength (and it is substantial) is in their writing. They’ve designed the show with seamless segues from one scene to the next, and the variety of scenarios they cycle through feel very specific to how these men view the world, i.e. the consent song.

Linic is the lankier, more vulnerable of the two, and he has a twitchy energy that suggests the show might run off the rails at any moment. Archer tends to play normal types who invariably reveal deep bouts of weirdness (such as his improvised take on a water polo “bro”).

This is a sketch show that feels like a complete thought, coming full circle at the end. And it’s one that’s thoughtful enough to ask for your consent.

Through Feb. 27 at iO Theater, 3541 N. Clark St. Tickets are $5 at 773-880-0199 or ioimprov.com/chicago.

"The Tennessee Williams Project"

"The world is accident-prone,” shrugs the murderous owner of a rooming house, “and the loss of one fool makes room for another.”

That’s a great P.T. Barnum-esque line stuffed into an otherwise tedious, rarely produced one-act from Tennessee Williams. The play, a nasty bit of work called “The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde,” is an experiment in sadistic pastiche that borrows a bit from “Sweeney Todd,” Samuel Beckett and British boarding-school nightmares.

Certainly Williams’ playwriting output in the 1940s and ’50s was up there with the best of them, though the same could be said of his drug and alcohol consumption (which likely led to his death in 1983). It is from those decades in-between that the Hypocrites and director Matt Hawkins have pulled from obscurity three short plays.

Good luck finding definitive background information about these scripts or when precisely they were written; perhaps Williams himself knew they weren’t substantial enough to see the light of day. They are curiosities, no more, no less — though the production design for each is terrifically intricate and smart.

The aforementioned rooming house horror show has little to recommend it beyond a richly smug performance by Eric Leonard as a bloviator going on about his old prep school days.

Also on tap is “The Big Game”, which doesn’t feel like a play so much as an outline for story to-be-determined-later about three hospital patients who bond over their fear of mortality. It’s written in the style of an old educational film from the 1950s, which should be funny, not strangely dull, but there you have it.

“And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens …” is the most overtly “Williams” piece of the trio, with a title that riffs on a line from Shakespeare’s “Richard II” (“For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground, And tell sad stories of the death of kings”).

This is Williams at his least closeted. Gone are the obfuscations and coded language of his masterworks. Set in New Orleans, it concerns the transactional relationship between a sophisticated if emotionally desperate crossdresser (Patrick Gannon) and the thuggish homophobic sailor who can’t quite rebuff his advances (Joseph Wiens).

There’s real sexual tension between Gannon and Wiens, the latter giving just enough hard stares that you can see the guy debating whether he should give into what he clearly desires. The stop-start nature of their flirtation plays as legitimate romantic comedy, particularly the dream sequence that has Wiens sitting down at the piano for a serenade. All of that sours, of course. And ultimately, it confirms Williams was perhaps the most pessimistic romantic of the 20th century, whether he was writing about gay relationships or straight.

Through March 2 at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division St. Tickets are $28-$36 at the-hypocrites.com.